For sundry reasons I have been helping my friend Deborah fix up the house that she recently bought. It was quite inexpensive and considerably overpriced.

I am not, you understand, the only person engaged in this project. There is the plumber and the electrician (the same man actually), the chap who tears out walls and puts up sheet rock, another chap who is skilled at sanding floors and charges accordingly, the friendly folks at Sears who put in new appliances and remove old ones, usw.

The house was a lovely house when it was built circa 1915. The original owners maintained it in a style of quiet elegance - at least to that level of quiet elegance to be found in Highmore in in 1915. Over the years, however, it has had a variety of owners, some of whom have allowed it to deteriorate, and some who actively participated in the deterioration.

Deb has assumed that the major effort would be cosmetic - painting the wall, stripping and cleaning moldings, putting up new curtains, sanding the floors, that sort of thing. To be sure there were intimations that not all was as it should be ...

For example, there was that half bath in what had once been the kitchen. This was a 5'x5' box paneled with the cheapest panelling to be found, something that might be found in an Ed Wood production of Doctor Who. Concealed within this box was a sink and a stool. Also concealed beneath them but not immediately obvious was rotting wood - whoever had installed this architectural wonder had not been the most proficient of plumbers.

Then there was the suspended ceiling in the living room. The house had lovely high ceilings - why the suspended ceiling? We decided to take the panels down; this led to some unpleasant discoveries. To begin with, the old ceiling (plaster of course) was working itself up to falling down. There was a large board nailed to the old ceiling to hold it in place. Then there was the leaky bathroom. The upstairs bathroom leaked - badly. The tub leaked, the stool leaked, and the sink leaked. The old ceiling had fallen away in that corner and the new ceiling tile was moldy.

And what about that board nailed across the wall that seemed to be stopping a pipe from falling into the living room. Ah, that was easily explained. The board was there to stop a pipe, a cast-iron vent pipe, from falling into the living room. That also explained why there was a 2x4 propping up a pipe in the basement - the self-same pipe.

The end result of these discoveries was that the original bathroom was ripped out to the studs, ALL of the previous plumbing was replaced, the toilet in the kitchen and its attendant paneling was removed, and a new ceiling went into the living room.

We won't even mention the horrors of the dining room - it too was stripped to the studs. Then there are the minor things. The previous owners had been elderly folks who smoked a lot and had an aversion to cleaning their house. The miniblinds had been installed quite some time ago and had quite evidently never been cleaned since. Over the years they had acquired that shade that I am told has the trade name of nicotine gold. It was a grayish version because the dust had bonded with the tars to form a protective enamel on the blinds. Deb threw them all away.

The capper was the ninth inning save. People had been working off and on on the various projects for a couple of months. Perhaps it is different in other parts of the country, but in these parts contractors take on more work than they can handle and then run back and forth between jobs, shortchanging them all. Everything SHOULD have been done in mid november. The day before Thanksgiving the plumber/electrian finally connected up the stove, the sink, and the dishwasher.

.... The next day she prepared dinner for sixteen - in her new kitchen.